Top 81 Quotes & Sayings by Barry Levinson - Page 2

If you test Iron Man and that audience doesn't respond well, you can be damn sure that there is something wrong with the movie that you have to address. Because they're expecting a certain amount of action, right? They want a hero. There are certain things that have to be compatible with the way the audience is thinking about it. If you take some other film, like No Country for Old Men, you can end up with all kinds of crazy reactions.

I don't see Sarah Palin suddenly spilling over to a wider group where suddenly they go, "Wait a minute, I've heard her message, and now I'm beginning..." It's not expanding it. A politician that doesn't expand from the base is not a good politician. So I disagree with all the talking heads that go "Well, she's a very good politician." She's not! Good politicians expand, and she doesn't.

Different reactions while film test screening doesn't mean even the audience thinks ambiguity is a bad thing. But if you're asking them right away to start checking things off, they don't know what to do. I think at their best, it applies to when the audience knows what it is. Then, when they say, "Oh, well, I thought it was too boring in blah-blah-blah part," then you better pay attention to it. It's like going for the hamburger. Better be the good hamburger I went for.

I thought a great line in the What Just Happened movie said, "We're just the mayonnaise."

I don't know that you can do an absurdist film and just have everybody embrace it in terms of filling out cards. I just don't think it happens. So you have to prepare an audience.

Studios just sometimes make decisions on their own that you're always flabbergasted by. It just happens that way for whatever reason - not even pointing fingers, it just is.

It's always hard to explain why an audience ultimately responds to a movie.

Even back in the '90s, I shot certain things on something that wasn't digital then, but it was on VHS with a smaller camera and we would up it to film.

I would give the cameras to the kids in the swimming pools and they would play with them, and then I would collect them and we would upload it. If you're in the process, you're there.

As soon as digital editing came about, I immediately made the switch to digital.

I've had a lot of movies that didn't get great numbers on test screening, but a lot of times the film was able to survive, or the studio still stayed and supported it.

I always think that there is the good and the bad of it all.

Everybody's trying to hold onto some shred of dignity in the process of it all, and, at the same time, never talking about how they don't have the power. No one has the power. So, you know, producers - we always think, "Well, producers are very powerful," but producers don't really have the power.

Ronald Reagan was this actor who was going to be president, and he was very charming. What he had was, he talked about America in ways that got people all caught up in it. He was creating this America - it could even be the mythical "America" - that we subscribe to.

You do understand that you can't force the situation, but in terms of how you edit, you can define that to take the audience along, whether it be a storyline or a character moment that we can play out. The more experience you've had, the more beneficial it is, period.

I do know when you look at some ballplayer and all of a sudden he is the size of a truck something is wrong.

I don't know what Bruce Willis has done in real life. We know actors have certainly had tirades - that's for sure. I never had troubles with him, but the big issue is really less about what Bruce is, as opposed to - this behavior has taken place, and sometimes it came out at something that had credibility, as opposed to, "No, I want to be fat and have a beard." Other people say, "I don't give a damn about the credibility. I paid $20 million. I want to see a movie star."

There was a time when I said, "I'm going to go do a television thing," after doing all these theatrical films, and heard, "Television? Why are you going to go back to television?" It's an interesting place.

I think we are seeing a radical shift in the business in general. The studios are making much more of the real big extravaganzas and there are other kinds of films that are coming out. I think you are going to begin to see more diversification that we've seen in the past.

I think it's a promising time which will show a lot of diversification that we've seen in the past.

I'm fascinated by documentaries, to begin with. Because of the nature of television, as opposed to theatrical, documentaries can be in this long form and take you on a journey.